STOCK MARKET WATCH - Tuesday, 31 January 2012

[Ghost Dog]

47. A thousand years on,an updated Silk Road will bypass the West

... Countries elsewhere are certainly being attracted by China's magnetic pull. George Osborne talked at Davos with pride about the arrival of renminbi offshore trading in London. Germany sees China as a vital destination for its engineering products. The French are benefiting from a surge in demand for Bordeaux wines as the Chinese buy up buckets of the stuff, regardless of vintage.

The real action, however, is going on outside Europe and, indeed, bypassing the US. We are witnessing the creation of a Southern Silk Road, a return on the grandest of scales to the trade patterns of a thousand years ago. Trade back then was centred on Asia, the Middle East and East Africa. Europe, stuck in the Dark Ages, played only a bit part. <-- Except for parts of the Byzantine Empire, and of course Al Ándalus...

Growth in the world economy will increasingly depend on the multiplying links between Asia, the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America. Trade and capital flows between these geographically separate parts of the emerging world are still relatively modest. With a huge expansion of cross-border infrastructure investment, the establishment of new centres of financial excellence and the opening-up of new consumer markets, the Southern Silk Road could offer a revolution every bit as big as the opening-up of trade between the industrialised nations in the years following the end of the Second World War.

How the West copes with this remains to be seen. We are seeing a shifting centre of gravity, both politically and economically. The West can choose to grow old gracefully, accepting its diminished status in the world order. Or it can choose to resist the process, becoming ever-more isolationist. It's a fundamental choice, but one the Davos crowd didn't really want to think about: they were happy to believe that, with a few tweaks, the old order could be preserved...

/... http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/comment/stephen-king/stephen-king-a-thousand-years-onan-updated-silk-road-will-bypass-the-west-6296650.html

No, I don't think this is by that Stephen King. But I could be wrong.